SLA recalculating outside of the established rules

[Cindi Miller (she/her)]

As of March 19, 2025 I noticed that the Time to SLA is recalculating the SLA Due Date with what appears to be every action on the Jira Issue. The SLA rules in place are such that only modifying the Severity or moving from Closed to Open should force re-calculation of the SLA Due Date. What might be causing this?

[Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Cindi Miller (she/her) 

Time to SLA recalculates the SLA Due Date on every issue change, and this behaviour is by design.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

• Jira Cloud event listening is broader: the apps' listeners can only listen generic events like issue created, issue updated, issue transitioned, issue commented, etc. These events are broad and don’t indicate which specific fields have changed. The apps only know the detail within the listener functions.
• Time to SLA supports highly flexible and complex SLA configurations. Because of this complexity, it’s not feasible for the app to selectively listen for changes to only certain fields like Severity or Status.

To ensure the SLA data is always accurate, the app recalculates on every issue event regardless of which field was actually modified.

I hope I was helpful

[Cindi Miller (she/her)]

Thank you Tuncay for the quick response. 

I guess what surprised me is that we have a trigger posting to slack whenever a Jira issue is updated and for all the days prior to last Wednesday, March 19th, we were not seeing any Slack posts that Jira issues were being updated as part of SLA re-calculation.

I am not aware of any changes made to the SLA or trigger setup (FWIW, we're a pretty small team so I don't have rason to believe anyone else modified them). And therefore it seems odd that this just started happening. Ideas?

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Cindi Miller (she/her) -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding to the suggestions from @Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_ ...

How are you sending the notifications to Slack?  For example, is it with an automation rule?  If so:

• when was the rule created / last updated
• which trigger is the rule using (e.g., generic Work Item Updated, Work Item Field Changed, etc.)
• did you notice an increase / decrease in the Slack messages when the Atlassian ecosystem was having problems with automation executions last week: https://jira-software.status.atlassian.com/

Kind regards,
Bill

[Cindi Miller (she/her)]

Hi Bill

We use the Slack integration app to post to a slack channel whenever a Jira issue is 'updated'. (See attached).

Since the inception of the slack channel and the automated posting to it was setup in early January, 2025, there was not a single instance of an entry named Time to SLA updated the SLA Due Date of a Bug until last Wednesday, March 19 - which (coincidentally?) is a day after the Atlassian ecosystem problem you reported.

Red herring or potential root cause?

TY for your support!

Cheers

cindi

[Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_]

Hi again,

Now, that's weird. I was expecting issue updates to be the reason of SLA recalculation but in your case it seems, recalculation causes issue updates.

Is there any paused condition in your SLA definition? Pause condition might cause updating due date continuously, each minute in paused condition means due date is delayed a minute. I am not saying this is the case but it is worth seeing your SLA definition, or you can raise a ticket to Appfire to see if there is an incident related to these updates.

[Cindi Miller (she/her)]

Hi Tuncay

Yes there is a 'pause' clause, in this case when the Issue is moved to "WAITING/BLOCKED". I wasn't aware the team was using this status with regularity but it appears they recently began doing so - presumably to pause the SLA while they await additional details. 

Mystery solved.

Thank you so much!!!

Cheers

cindi